DK1: Farmer field schools for climate friendly farming

Summary of final report:

This participatory research project was not realised as originally intended, for a number of good reasons. These reasons can be summarised into learning points which hopefully can guide other initiatives with similar or likewise aims. The following points will be explained in more details below:

It came up as a desired participatory project, because of current public debates and concerns. A number of Thise dairy producers found it quite urgent and important and consider their climate impact as part of collective action.

Thise Dairy Company and Organic Denmark had engaged in a mutual project where all farmers over a two year period had ‘climate action plans’ drawn-up for each their farms. However, many wanted to have more detailed and clear ideas of what they potentially could do to improve the climate impact of their production system.

Farmer Field Schools is potentially a powerful approach for mutual learning. This was the reason for identifying it as the method of implementing climate action – primarily mitigating action – in organic and low-input dairy farming. However, evaluating the possibilities more closely, several arguments came up for why this approach is not sufficient in the case of climate action, as further explained below.

Climate friendly organic dairy production was seen as very well connected to low-input farming: e.g. less concentrate, especially concentrate which had been transported over distance (e.g. imported soya), and of using grasslands which had carbon sequestration potentials, using as little fossil fuels as possible, less plastic, more renewable energy, reuse of water etc. Therefore the idea fitted quite well into a project with focus on organic and low-input production.